Musings of a Working Mum: The Importance of being Earnest
By far the greatest challenges working mums face is balancing the needs of their employers, businesses, careers etc. against family demands. I suspect that there is no secret formula and each and every one of us find a rhythm that works, usually one borne of compromise (please do share if you have a fail proof formula).
It is often easy to blame employers for not doing enough to accommodate working mums. Whilst I am a firm believer that organisations must be held to account for clear failings in considering the wellbeing of their employees when setting objectives etc., I have also learned to look inwards and apportion some of the blame my way on occasion. Have I been clear in making my priorities known? Have I created the impression that its ok to treat my working hours as 24/7? Now, before you think I am promoting that we working mums take on even more on our plates in the blame game…. I am not. However, I believe we can do more to be clearer about our priorities. It is important for us to at a minimum set the scene with work, same as we inevitably have to do at home. For some reason its easier to say to our families, I hope you understand but mummy has to work, but we are less comfortable saying the same to our jobs when we need to make concessions for family matters. I fully accept that families often come with unquestionable love and devotion, plus there aren’t a dozen ‘replacement’ mummies lying around so we aren’t at risk of being fired or passed up in the same way that we may be with work. Nevertheless, the cost of perpetuating a false reality only serves to harm our overall wellbeing and we need to take steps to address that.
The needs of most organisations has been to historically prioritise the selection and promotion of a workforce which places the goals of the organisation above all else. The measure of a ‘good worker’ draws many parallels with a ‘worker bee’ i.e. an individual with a single minded focus to delivering for the greater good to the exclusions of all else particularly the pesky business of a family competing for attention!
In my particular field the billable hours model was (and in many firms continues to be) the measure of success and by default the main determinant for career progression. Accordingly, between maternity leave, accommodating school holidays and the inevitable concessions necessary when looking after the little ones (for those women who were primary care givers) this model has effectively derailed many a woman’s career. As a result, the legal profession continues to suffer an imbalance such that, despite more female entrants than men into the profession for a number of years, there is a significant under representation of women within the more senior echelons of the profession.
As we increasingly move towards a world where issues of gender parity begin to take center stage and organisations scramble to ‘get it right’, now is the perfect time for working mums to speak up. If a work life balance is important to you then speak up and be clear about it. There is no point sitting in an interview and saying my career is my life and I am always available all hours of the day if that is not the case. I am a committed career woman and I take great pride in my job, work hard and go the extra mile whenever I can not just because of career progression but because I know that there may be days when I can’t give 110% , days when the school calls and say your child’s been sick and you need to come pick him up and I know that I can say to work I need time to be a mum first without fear that I will be labelled as flighty or flaky.
Open and honest conversations set the stage for a better work life balance.
If you have a desire to do more things outside of work then be open and honest about it. Now I can’t guarantee that your employers are going to be accommodating but at the very least you’ll know where you stand from the get go. Life is too short and precious to have to pretend that you are a worker bee with no intention of a family life beyond ‘feeding the colony’!
